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Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher founder and director of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome back to the FoST podcast. My guest on today's episode is award-winning XR Producer, Cortney Harding. Through her studio, Friends with Holograms, Cortney has created a successful business producing virtual and augmented reality experiences for employee training purposes and has done so in a way that brings the full power of immersive media and the skills of an empathetic storyteller to a genre not typically known for its artistic sensibilities. Her work tackles complex, deeply human subjects, such as combating workplace harassment and spurring conversations about mental health and allows viewers to model their own behavior in difficult situations. Through this work, Cortney has demonstrated that XR can serve as an incredibly powerful tool for teaching both hard and soft skills and for instilling empathy. As you'll hear in today's interview, her results speak for themselves. I'm very excited to welcome Cortney to the FoST podcast.

Cortney Harding, it is such a delight and pleasure to have you on the Future of StoryTelling podcast.

Cortney Harding:

Oh, thank you. It's such a delight to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

I'm so excited about your new book, A Practical Guide To Making VR That Changes The World.

Cortney Harding:

Yeah, the title's a little bit silly, right? It's, you know, how do you build something that is going to change things, right? But the idea is really to get people thinking about how you can use virtual reality to create systemic change and social impact and getting people to think beyond the paradigms of how they maybe thought about VR previously, which is in gaming or sort of the other more popular applications.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, I mean I think most people are coming at VR from that perspective, right? Some sort of gaming experience, or I don't know, virtual travel or whatever, but most people aren't thinking about using that medium to change the world. What about it makes you believe that it can have that kind of profound impact?

Cortney Harding:

What really changed things for me was seeing people's incredible emotional responses to some of the work that we've done. And what we've seen that's really transformative is the idea that you can be living a situation that you've never been in before. So we've done pieces on racial bias, we've done pieces on workplace inclusion, we've done pieces on mental health and what these pieces really get at is not just teaching people that these things are bad. We all know these things are bad at this point, but how it feels when it's happening to you, because there are people who have never felt these feelings before and to have something so profound happen to you can really expand your mind and make you more sympathetic and empathetic and more driven to create social change and to change your own behavior.

Charlie Melcher:

I know that I had that experience doing one of your pieces, The Avenues, that was the name of it, right?

Cortney Harding:

Yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

And it really puts you in such a unique perspective to be able to have to make decisions almost kind of moral decisions about what you were seeing. And I mean, this is like the farthest from a game I can imagine. It almost makes you uncomfortable to have to sort of be in that position and you do it in a way that uses real footage, real actors, real live situations. This is not an animated or virtual kind of world. These are real world scenarios. Describe the setup of Avenues for us.

Cortney Harding:

Yeah, absolutely. So Avenues is a really brilliant piece that we're so proud to have worked on. And basically the folks at Accenture who we worked with on the project came to us and the main problem was that there was a huge issue with turnover among child welfare workers, because they weren't prepared to go out into the field and talk to these families that are in deep crisis. And they really were prepared to deal with families who were in this kind of gray area, right?

So everyone knows if you walk into a house and it's clearly dangerous, or the child is clearly being abused, that you pull them out, that is something you learn on day one when you get your degree in social work. The issue is more kind of the nuance of it. Is the family abusive or are they just poor, right? Are the parents neglecting their children or are they just working three jobs so that they can keep a roof over their head and they have no other childcare options because their parents are in rehab or any number of scenarios.

So what we did with this piece was we really wanted to create something that had a lot of gray area and nuance. And you wanted to come out of the experience, feeling really uncertain. Did you make the right decision? Did you ask the right questions? Because the way the piece works is you have different options for each topic to ask different questions and you get a different answer depending on the question that you ask. So with some of the questions you just get yes or no answers, right? You don't get a lot of other information. If you ask the question a different way, you get more background.

So there's a line of questioning in there where the mother's boyfriend, partner is, you're asking him about his drug use, right? And if you say, "Have you ever been arrested for using drugs?" He just says, "Yes." And kind of glares at you and so that's a really negative impression of him. If you ask the question in a more open ended way, he tells you that he has a drug background, but he's been in rehab and he's been clean for several months and he's a sponsor for Narcotics Anonymous and all these things that let you know that, okay yeah, he's made mistakes in the past, but he's cleaned up his act and now he's sincerely on the right path to getting better. And that gives you a really different impression. So you go through this whole experience, you ask all these questions and what you're really left with still is this level of uncertainty.

And the fascinating thing about that piece is we've had so many people go through it and everyone wants to debrief it and talk about it. And it's the people I've shown it to are mostly not social workers. They are friends of mine and my hairdresser really liked it. And we had a good long conversation about it, right? These are sort of regular people and the level of like concern, right? I've had people take off the headset and cry, which is really exciting for me and I also have to temper my excitement to not look like a psychopath.

And I've had people, I showed it to a good friend of mine and he's somebody who knows a ton about technology, doesn't touch the social workspace, but he went through the entire piece and then at the very end where you have to render a decision, if the child is safe or not, he sat there silently for a minute and then two minutes and time is ticking by. And I'm thinking, "Oh God, it's broken, he's confused, he's stuck in the headset, it's frozen something, something." And he got so emotionally invested in it that he had to sit there and really think about, "Okay, are the parents trying hard? Is this child being neglected?" And that's something that we really take across all of our work is the idea that people shouldn't necessarily be feeling comfortable in these experiences. These experiences should be provocative, not unduly so, but if I put someone through one of the experiences that we've built around exclusion or bias, or the child welfare piece, and they say, "Gosh, that was really uncomfortable." That's actually a thrilling thing for me to hear, because that means it's made an impact.

Charlie Melcher:

What I feel like you're doing with your pieces is you're taking it beyond that sense of being there. And you're moving it to a place of giving people agency. And not just like action agency and you have agency in a game obviously, but here you're having this kind of moral agency. Like there's real outcomes from your actions and difficult questions that you're being forced to confront. And I do think that it's a very high order way of trying to get people to learn by literally putting them in somebody else's shoes, or letting them have a kind of empathy for them.

Cortney Harding:

Yeah I think the agency part of it is really critical because for this type of storytelling, you do need to have a level of agency. But then we have to figure out, "Okay, what are the boundaries around that agency, right?" So with the child welfare piece, you had three options, but the questions were scripted. And a lot of that has to do just with how the technology works. So we're constantly thinking about how do we design for agency within the constraints of the technology and the budgets we're working with because people have to feel like they are involved. That's not to say that sometimes we don't do things that are less involved or structured, and that's primarily a storytelling choice. So we've worked on pieces where you don't have a lot of agency, but the feeling is one of frustration because you don't have agency, you're just watching the action and you can't intercede. It's not just a choice of like, we're going to stick a 360 camera somewhere and let the action go and you're just going to passively watch it, it's a storytelling narrative choice that is deliberate.

Charlie Melcher:

Hmm. I mean I think that stories are one of those ways that we've always gotten to experience the world from somebody else's perspective, right? That a story is an effort to transcend a brain in a body that's separate from the rest of the world.

It reminds me, actually, of my experience as a grammar school kid in the Ethical Culture Fieldston School where I went as a child and we had these ethics classes once a week, where the ethics teacher would come in and I think we were maybe in fourth grade and we'd all sit in a circle and he would just literally tell us a story, but it was a story that had a moral dilemma in it, for example, was it okay for a father to steal some medicine to help if it was going to help save his child's life? Okay and he's in front of the judge and now at the end of this story, the ethics teacher's asking us to decide, should he go to jail? Should he be released? Was this a justifiable crime? And we would go home and we'd spend that evening at the dinner table, like debating this with our parents. And we would all come back in the next week ready to sort of defend a particular position. And sometimes there would be actually a real answer. And sometimes there wasn't, but the idea was just to get us to face this moral or ethical challenge and to start to develop, if you will, an ethical sensibility, those muscles and your work reminds me more of that than anything I've seen or done since.

Cortney Harding:

Oh my gosh thank you. One of the things that we try to do in our storytelling is create those nuances, create those gray areas. So the piece on racial bias we did, you find out that this young associate who's behaving in a very biased way towards the user is saying like, "Oh, we've had all these theft in the store before and I'm just trying to do my job and I'm going to get, I'll get fired if I don't stop the theft and this and that." So clearly this person is in the wrong, right? They're discriminating against somebody who's just in the store to like buy supplies, but you do kind of see like, okay, they're also in a position where they're trying to do a job and they don't want to get fired, right? If another theft happens on their watch, so they react in this way that is not great. But yeah, I think that we live in gray areas, right? It's almost never black or white, especially when you're dealing with these sort of thorny topics. And so we want to make sure that our stories that we tell on VR have that element of a lot of gray area.

Charlie Melcher:

So the thing that I think is so interesting that we need to mention here, your company is a company that makes training videos for corporations. And I think that that's not what most of our listeners would expect to have heard after this conversation so far. Like that's kind of a surprise when you think about it, because right, training videos, I think of like, how do we fix this turbine or very practical construction kind of things in training videos. Tell us about the kind of work you do with corporations and helping training people.

Cortney Harding:

Yeah so we have done a few of those, nothing to do with turbines, but we have done a handful of training pieces that are a little bit more sort of, how do you fix a partner data center, how do you stock a shelf at a store? And those are interesting and those are useful because a, those do have really good outcomes in terms of people learning faster and training better. But you can also think, okay, some of these jobs are pretty boring. They're pretty rote. How can you use VR to not only teach people how to do a skill correctly, but to make it interesting? So we've thought a lot in that space about gamifying these things and allowing people to feel like more engaged in their work and more valued in the work that they're doing. Even if the work that they're doing is a little bit rote.

We, as a company, believe in the value of work and the value of workers and making sure that any training we do honors the work and the skill that goes into it, no matter what we're training for. We also sort of exist in opposition to the sort of current training industrial complex, which is really boring, right? I've worked in big corporations at various points in my life and I've had to sit through the sexual harassment training videos that are just awful. I mean, they're just so bad. Clearly they were made just so a lawyer could tick a box so you can't sue them or whatever. And not only are they boring and kind of silly, it's also really insulting to the lived experience of people who have dealt with these situations, right?

So this goes beyond the idea of like, we're just putting a training video in a VR headset. That is not what we want to do at all. What we want to do is give credence and weight to these very real lived experiences of people who are overworked and underpaid and their job is to protect the lives of children. How can we honor that and create something that is really meaningful and useful and memorable, the same with the workplace exclusion. You know many of us have felt left out in the workforce and it's been traumatic. How can we give credence to that experience and allow people who luckily haven't had that experience to understand just how awful that feels.

Charlie Melcher:

So you're working, even though you're telling emotionally powerful stories or letting people experience, I shouldn't say, just tell, you know to experience emotionally powerful stories you're working for companies. And so they have a return on investment they're thinking about. How effective is VR as a training tool and what kind of data do you have to support that?

Cortney Harding:

It is very effective as a training tool. So the State of Indiana started using the child welfare piece to train social workers and prior to starting to use it, they had a 50% case worker turnover rate every year, which is huge. Half of all case workers would start and then leave and-

Charlie Melcher:

How inefficient.

Cortney Harding:

Yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

Terribly inefficient.

Cortney Harding:

Completely inefficient, very, very expensive and terrible for families because a family in crisis needs consistency and continuity and good relationships and if you've got a new case worker coming on every couple of months who doesn't know your history, who doesn't have a bond with the family, then it's just a disaster. So Indiana starts using it and within six months their case worker turnover rate dropped from 50% to 18%.

Charlie Melcher:

Wow.

Cortney Harding:

Which is astonishing. The State of Georgia started using it actually right before the pandemic, they found it had a 75% reduction in training costs. And just as if not better results in terms of the training outcomes. So we're seeing these really important big numbers, right? So if you're looking for return on investment, if you are a big company and you've got a bottom line and a boss who cares about the bottom line, which everyone does, these are numbers, you can really show. So there's all these different metrics and data that you can look at to see how this stuff pays off. Whether it's from a training efficacy perspective, whether it's from a worker retention perspective, whether it's from a speed of learning perspective, all these different ways you can look at it and tally it up and VR is going to clearly come out on top as a training solution.

Charlie Melcher:

That's amazing. I do want to say though, I think it's not guaranteed. You do have to still make a great VR piece.

Cortney Harding:

Oh, absolutely, yeah. And I've seen some, I mean, I've seen some awful VR pieces and I'm sure you have, and I think we all have, if you spend enough time in VR. So yeah you can't like, you can't just put a headset on people and expect radical change, right? A headset is a neutral tool, right? It's just a tool for content distribution and interaction. So you do need to build really good stuff in order to have that impact absolutely.

Charlie Melcher:

So now let's ask a little bit, let me ask you a little bit about how you make good VR. The book is a practical guide. You've been doing it for a long time. Please share some of your great insights about how you make great VR.

Cortney Harding:

The first question we ask, everyone that we work with is how do you want someone to feel at the end of the experience? It's not about what do you want them to learn, although that comes later and that's a huge part of it. It's what is the emotionality of it? Do you want someone to walk out of this experience feeling really competent, right? So if you're teaching hard skills, how to fix a part of the data center, how to stock a shelf, how to do a dangerous construction task, you want someone to take off the headset and be like, "I got this, I know what I'm doing, I practiced it, I'm great." The more emotional stuff that's where things get a little tricky.

We very much believe in using real people for emotional learning. We really don't think avatars work as well when it comes to that emotional connection, because you know that it's not real. And the best way to connect with somebody is to have something that is very real and very present. And we design for the least technical person in the room. I've been in VR experiences where I've put on a headset, somebody's handed me a controller and then they kind of have to hang over my shoulder and say, "Click this, now click this, now tell teleport here, now up and down, right and left," and I just take off the headset and I'm like, "You know what? No." And I've had a couple them say to me, "Do you know how to use VR?" And I just have to walk away from them cause I'm like, "Yeah, I do."

Charlie Melcher:

I do, do you?

Cortney Harding:

Yeah, I do. Yeah and you don't because you designed something that is so complicated. If you're designing for a mass audience, you need to make it very simple. People get weird in the VR headset the first time they put it on. It is strange you have lost one of your senses. If you have headphones on, you've lost two of your senses and that can feel very unsafe and uncomfortable, especially if you're not a very technical person. So we want to make sure that given all of that people are as comfortable as they can be. So that's another really big core principle for us.

And the really nice thing about VR is you can make mistakes consequence-free. And that's what's great about VR training for sort of higher stakes situations, whether that's families in crisis or dangerous construction work. I was talking to somebody in an airline who did a training on fire extinguisher safety for flight attendants. I did it just to test it and yeah, everyone's dead on that hypothetical plane, sorry guys. But you know, the great thing about it was I could just keep hitting, reset and reset. And the other good thing about that is it grooves into your neural pathways so that you feel like you have been in this situation before.

Charlie Melcher:

I have an example, I'd love to reference of exactly this, Lowe's stores where people go to buy materials to do-it-yourself home projects. And they found that one of the number one reasons people don't do projects at home is because they don't feel comfortable with the tools. "Oh, I've never used a hedge mower before. You know, so it's a big knife that's shaking. I don't want to buy that and try this at home." So they created a VR simulator for a bunch of these heavy tools where you could put on the VR headset, they created a dummy version of the hedge cutter.

It's kind of gamifying it, but now you're taught how to cut a hedge using this thing that's shaking in your hands. And when people do it a few times, they then have this sense of, "Oh, I'm familiar with this." And it leaves them with a sense of confidence. That's equivalent to people actually have done it before and really used the tools and that has been a huge influence in people's ability to then go ahead and buy the tool because now they feel like they know what they're doing. And all through in-store VR simulations.

Cortney Harding:

We've advanced so much just in the last couple of years and the number of companies that have picked up VR technology, Walmart, Verizon, Lowe's, all these different government agencies, military, different foundations and on and on and on, it really is the sort of astonishing hockey stick. And if you look at people buying headsets, it's this astonishing hockey stick. So I really do think this is catching on. Maybe not as fast as I would like, because again, I like to move very quickly, but I think people are really waking up to the power of this. And I think the more people feel comfortable with it and the more people see the possibilities, right?

It's still very tricky to show people some of this work and because Oculus and a lot of the headsets really are interested in gaming, that's great, that's a huge market. But the challenge is if you're the head of human resources at a big company, and you want to learn about VR, you pick up a headset, all you're going to see are games and the more content that's out there that is like interesting storytelling content that people can be inspired by, the better. So I think the more people are creating, more people are putting stuff into the market, more people are building more people are teaching, right? Like schools are launching different VR programs, universities and like that's incredibly exciting to me because the more people are playing in the sandbox, the more widespread the technology's going to be. We have to make sure that it's being used ethically, responsibly, all of that absolutely. But I do think the more it grows, the more people are going to get excited and really wake up to the possibilities.

Charlie Melcher:

I remember when Oculus first launched right, in 2014 and we had Chris Milk's VR piece, I think it was that year at FoST, our first VR piece that we showed. I think it was his first VR piece and it's debut was at FoST as a physical experience. And there was great, very quickly there was great enthusiasm. There was this sense of it was going to take over the world within a couple of years and that didn't really materialize.

And then there were a number of companies that sort of backed away, both VR and AR sort of backing away or deciding to shift to do corporate type things instead of some of the initial hopes of it replacing movies and all sorts of new kind of immersive entertainment that were going to come. And I remember that time feeling my heart drop, because I of course want people to make amazing stories in the, great entertainment. And I was thinking what a shame these companies are all having to pivot to do kind of corporate VR, corporate AR. And you've shown me that actually that could be such a fertile place for storytelling, for more complicated issues, for things that are really profoundly human. And I wonder where you think this might be heading. How's it going to evolve both in the corporate space or in the sort of entertainment space?

Cortney Harding:

You know, it's going to be one of those things where in 10 years a headset is just as common as a phone or a laptop or a tablet. It's just something you have in your house. And hopefully we'll see a resurgence of all the creative work that happened very early much like where you can go watch old movies now that you were maybe lost to time previously, you'll see more and more VR coming around. So it's going to take time. I'm not by nature a patient person, but I've learned to be, which is challenging to say the least, but you know, I do feel excited about the future because more and more people are starting to think about it and creating it and do things that wouldn't have been possible five years ago.

Charlie Melcher:

And I think just simply having a viable business as a VR creator is something that wasn't possible five years ago. So there's a growing ecosystem, which is wonderful and how do people see your pieces?

Cortney Harding:

Well, that's a huge challenge for us honestly. So because we work with big corporates, a lot of the times we're bound by NDAs and legal agreements where some of our clients won't even let us retain copies of the work. We have to hand over everything. And some of it we are able to demo for people in person, or we're able to send them a video or a file, but it's challenging. You know, it's very, very hard to get on the Oculus store, which is still the primary mode of distribution for most VR experiences that people are seeing. And I'm certainly, if people want to reach out to me, I'm certainly happy to set up demo sessions now that we're back in human form again. I'm happy to show people things and send clips and videos. There's videos and promos on our website that people can check out.

But yeah, it's really tough. I mean, it, that was a huge issue with us for the pandemic was, I was for a few months running a headset distribution service out of my apartment and my doorman got a real big tip at Christmas because I, you know he was very nice and handled a lot of packages for me every day because I couldn't show people the work any other way. I had to just be sending headsets out all the time to demo for people and demoing over Zoom. And it wasn't great. We did what we had to do. We got through it. And at a certain point, you know, now we're able to go back out again. But yeah, it's a challenge. I mean, I would love to see more of the headset manufacturers invest in creating this type of demo content almost. So at least people can see something, right? If they're like, "I'm interested in VR for training", here are five demo pieces that like, "All right, maybe they're not custom for me, or maybe they're not exactly what I'm training for", but they at least give you an idea of the possibilities.

Charlie Melcher:

First of all, it brings me back to when you literally came to my office and brought in a headset so I could experience Avenues.

Cortney Harding:

Yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, Cortney I'm so appreciative for your spending the time with us today and really encourage people to download or to buy a copy of, A Practical Guide to Making VR That Changes the World. And I just thank you for all the wonderful VR pieces you're making and your contribution to moving this medium forward and-

Cortney Harding:

Oh, well, thank you. And thank you so much for, FoST was a really life changing experience for me when I went the first time in 2016 and then, being part of it in 2017, 2018, and you know starting to work on it in 2020 and then of course, whatever happened, happened, but FoST is a place that I learn more every year and I go to a lot of conferences and a lot of events. And I always walk away from FoST feeling so inspired and learning so much and having met so many people and the environment that is created is so welcoming and democratizing. So thank you for having me and for amplifying all these different voices and for creating a place where people can really come and converge. Because I think we need that now more than ever. And you know, hopefully we'll be back in human form at FoST at some point sooner rather than later.

Charlie Melcher:

Hopefully. Can't wait.
 

Charlie Melcher:

Thanks so much to Cortney Harding for joining me on the podcast today. Her book, A Practical Guide To Making VR That Changes The World, is out now. You can learn more about it along with a full transcript of our conversation by visiting the link in this episode's description. Thank you for listening to the FoST podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Please subscribe and tell a friend. FoST also produces a monthly newsletter that if you're a storyteller of any kind, is really worth reading, it's free. So check it out by visiting our website fost.org under the content tab where you'll also find a wealth of other great material.

The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts & Leisure. I hope we'll see you again in a couple of weeks for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then please be safe, stay strong and story on.